Roastery + Coffee Shop

As a coffee shop we are in the “to go” industry like many others, which is convenient and quick and seems to make sense when you’re juggling work and kids and life. What stopped making sense about our own business though was when we heard that China stopped taking USA’s plastics for recycling in 2018. It made us think about all the single use to go cups that we offer our drinks in and what happened to them once they left the shop, or ended up in our trash. So here’s the breakdown: Since we opened our doors on December 26th 2016, we are responsible for putting over 55,000 paper cups, and over 33,000 plastic cups most likely in the landfill. Now, our plastic cups are “technically” recyclable because they are 1 PET plastic. Well friends, let me tell you that there is very big problem with recycling plastic not only in our country but the entire world. Out of all the plastics that have ever been produced on Earth, only less than 9% have ever truly become something recycled. That means 91% of the plastics ever produced are still sitting in a landfill, on the side of the road, but mostly floating in the ocean where they break down into microplastics and fish eat them, and then we eat the fish. Plastic is forever. It never goes away. Plastic is derived from petroleum, therefore you could say it is the biggest oil spill on planet Earth. Recycling plastics is not the feel-good civic duty that we thought it was. There are two parts to this. On one hand we as individuals are responsible for the choices we make and can decide to discontinue purchasing plastic. This all might seem daunting. One of the easiest ways we can all start to reduce plastic use is to bring our own clean reusable mugs to our favorite coffee shop. Maybe eventually companies will stop using plastic to package things in. The second part and what it comes down to is that companies like ourselves are responsible for every cup and single use item that does end up in the landfill, because we offered it to the customer that way.

So here it goes: By 2020 The Coffee Apothecary will be a single use item free coffee shop, and eventually zero waste. This means we will no longer have single use to-go cups, paper or plastic. We’ll be looking for alternatives to everything that we basically currently do now. We hope to make this transition as easy and as transparent as possible for you as a customer. Thank you all for your support in helping us do so.